AMD has listed the new Ryzen 5 9600X for pre-order on its Canadian Amazon store. Officially releasing with the rest of the Ryzen 9000-series on July 31st, the 9600X currently shows up at $472.45 CAD.
Determining the analogous U.S. price requires a bit of guesswork. The $472 CAD price at current exchange rates is equivalent to $345 USD, though our generous napkin math, accounting for taxes and the inflated rates Canadians pay for computer components (we're sorry, Canada), brings the potential price closer to $300 USD.
Alternatively, today the Ryzen 5 7600X costs $275 CAD vs the 'local' (for us) Amazon price of $185 USD, a 1.486X scaling factor. If this same factor is applied to 9600X, the US price falls at $318, squarely between the exact exchange conversion and our napkin math. That feels a lot more plausible but still doesn't give a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Working from an estimated $319 USD price tag gives us serious questions about the Ryzen 5 9600X. Last-gen's Ryzen 5 7600X also launched at a $299 price point. That price was the 7600X's greatest negative, and today the same chip sits at an official MSRP of $229 and can be had for $185 via Prime Day deals. If the 9600X launches even higher than that at $319, it will be a hard sell for consumers and will likely need to fall to the mid-$200s before long. We hope the current Canadian price is simply inflated to take advantage of pre-order buyers; otherwise, it may become the 9600X's Achilles' heel.
Traditionally, AMD's Ryzen 5 chips are incredibly attractive for mainstream gamers and PC enthusiasts, offering a great bang for the buck once online prices settle down. AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X is a six-core, 12-thread chip based on the Zen 5 architecture. Base clocks for the chip are 3.9 GHz, with boosts up to 5.4 GHz. This power will come with a TDP of 65W and a peak power draw of only 88W. A 38MB (6+32) cache and support for up to DDR5-5600 memory round out the spec sheet.
AMD showed the Ryzen 5 9600X crushing Intel's Core i5-14600K by 22% in productivity benchmarks and 11% in gaming at its Zen 5 Tech Day, with an 88W peak power draw versus Intel's 181W. A lead of this margin for almost half of the power shows strong performance for the bottom of AMD's Zen 5 desktop CPU slate, though as always we need to take manufacturer benchmarks with a spoonful of salt. If AMD prices Ryzen 5 9600X below $300 (which we suspect it will, eventually), it becomes a shoo-in for our best value CPU, a spot currently held by the Ryzen 5 7600X.
